The Devil and Ms. Moody (20 page)

Diablo heard the door click shut behind her, and the sound of it slammed into him like a gunshot. By the time he’d turned to the room’s one grimy window, she was going through the saddlebags on the motorcycle, sorting out her stuff. A moment later, clutching the few things she’d brought with her, she headed toward the office.

He despised what he’d just done to her, despised himself for hurting her, especially when she couldn’t possibly have known what she was getting into. His breath condensed on the windowpane as he watched her stumble on a loose rock and wrench her ankle. She was fighting tears and was swearing like a trucker if the rapid movement of her lips was any indication.

A bittersweet smile touched Diablo’s heart, and the impulse to go to her was as explosive as anything he’d ever felt.

He pressed a fist to the pane, pushing until his knuckles were bloodless. He would bring her only grief. Nothing else would come of it. Their passion wasn’t enough. It never could be enough. They were from different planets. She didn’t know it yet, but she was born to be the wife of some nice straight-arrow guy, a minister or a public accountant.

As she disappeared from his sight, a numbing certainty came over him. Edwina Moody was going to be fine. Just fine. She would wake up one day, blink her soft brown eyes, and her prince would be there. Happy ever after.

He rubbed the blood back into his throbbing knuckles. It was Chris Holt he ought to be worried about. What did the noble refugee from life need? A coldness swept through him as he turned away from the window. Exactly what he’d always needed. Another assignment, another trip into some dark anonymous hell. That was the sure way to forget everything but surviving to live another day. Beyond that, all he needed was a motorcycle, a fast road, and the wind in his face. Nothing else. No one else.

Not at all sure of her reception, Edwina paid a visit to the Warlords the next morning before she caught the plane for Connecticut. She couldn’t leave without some explanation, and she wanted to say good-bye. Perhaps she was also hoping to see Diablo at the campsite. There was no sign of him, however. The clearing where they’d slept and ate and had a fish fight was uninhabited. The charred logs and campfire ashes were the only visible reminder of their time together.

She found Carmen and the other women packing up for the last leg of the run to Mexico. Edwina approached them tentatively, relieved when Carmen beckoned her over.

“Where’s Squire?” Edwina asked, noticing that all the men were absent.

“Fishing,” Carmen explained with a long-suffering smile. “They’re
all
fishing.”

Edwina managed an answering smile. “At least they’re not hunting.” She looked around. “Speaking of which, how’s Food Chain?”

“Squire took him along. They’re inseparable.”

With a mischievous twinkle in her eye Carmen waved Edwina over to a classic Harley-Davidson motorcycle that had been customized, chopped, and fitted out with a sidecar. “It’s Killer’s bike,” she said. “Since he doesn’t have an old lady at the moment, he has the honor of chauffeuring Food Chain around.”

“I’ll bet he loves that.”

“I don’t know about Killer, but the pig’s a happy camper.”

As the women’s laughter subsided, Edwina remembered what she’d come there to do. Generously including Diablo in her apology, she explained to Carmen that sometimes people had to do the wrong thing for the right reason. “Diablo had a job to do,” she said. “I didn’t know what he was up to myself until Mad Dog had been apprehended.” She touched Carmen’s arm. “Anyway, neither of us meant you any harm.”

Carmen smiled reassuringly. “Diablo’s been here already,” she said. “He and Squire talked. I think everything’s okay.”

He’d been there? Edwina wanted to ask a million questions. How had he looked? Had he mentioned her? Where had he gone? Instead she nodded and smiled, although it nearly destroyed her to pretend such nonchalance. “That’s good,” she said lamely, suspecting that Carmen was waiting for her reaction. “I’m glad they resolved it.”

“I guess you and Diablo won’t be riding to Mexico with us?” she asked.

Sadness shadowed Edwina’s smile as she took one last look around the campground. It was hard to believe now that she’d actually ridden with the Warlords and shared their nomadic existence for severed days. “No, we won’t be going with you,” she said, a catch in her voice as she added, “But you have a good time, hear? And take care of Food Chain for me.”

“Champagne?” a male voice asked.

“What?” Edwina was jolted out of her reverie by a pair of smiling green eyes. Her heart nearly stopped before she realized it was simply the airline attendant doing his job. The cross-country flight had been overbooked, and she’d been bumped up into business class where drinks and snacks were complimentary.

The attendant held up the bottle, waiting for her answer.

“No, thanks,” she told him. She barely had her head above water emotionally speaking, and a drink would take her to the bottom like an anchor, she had no doubt. The attendant moved on to the next passenger, and Edwina studied him for a moment. He was short, blond, and scrupulously neat. Nothing like Diablo. All it had taken to stop her heart was that fleeting glimpse of green.

A sigh welled. She supposed that now every other man she met would have green eyes. Why was it always that way when you hurt? she wondered. The most innocuous things took on the power to bring pain, and suddenly they were everywhere, reminders of what you’d lost, visual land mines placed along the path of the brokenhearted. It was almost as though the cosmos was having a little joke at the jilted lover’s expense.

The irony in her smile was laced with heartache. Cupid must have been a mean little cuss, she thought, shooting arrows through people’s hearts. She certainly felt as though she’d been hit with something surgically sharp, a dart that had pierced her without benefit of anesthesia. Sometimes the pain came at her so unexpectedly, so jaggedly, that she wanted to draw into herself like a wounded animal.

Where was he now? she wondered. What was she doing? She caught her lower lip between her teeth, wondering if she’d done the right thing by leaving. He’d been cruel, but people in pain
were
cruel. The brutal references to his father and his past still haunted her. Maybe if she’d swallowed her pride and refused to leave, he would have opened up to her.

She shook her head and felt the heat of tears beneath her eyelids. His near rage was seared in her memory like a scar. A poignancy flared through her heart as she realized that he would have thrown her out bodily if she’d tried to stay. He would have brutalized her, not physically perhaps but in every other way.

She shook off her own pain then, unable to deal with it and refusing to torture herself any longer. She was being utterly foolish, as usual, trying to repair something that was irreparably damaged. She couldn’t have stayed in California, even if she’d had the courage. She had responsibilities.

When the pilot announced their landing at Kennedy an hour later, Edwina felt the full weight of those responsibilities pressing in on her. She hadn’t called home once during the time she’d been gone. It wasn’t deliberate—she’d simply been swept up by the things that were happening to her. But her mother would never understand that. Katherine Moody would be frantic. Especially since it was totally unlike Edwina not to check in. She called home several times a day when she was working out of the Norwalk office just ten miles away.

There was also the tax lien. She had used up more than a week of the grace period, and even though she’d found Diablo—or rather, Chris Holt—there was no guarantee that she would be entitled to her fee since he’d refused to claim his inheritance. Given his state of mind when they parted, she wasn’t going to put much stock in his promise that she would be paid.

She sighed and let her head drop back as she imagined trying to calm her mother’s fears. Both Katherine and Beth depended on her so heavily. Perhaps too heavily. They would have to be prepared for the worst, Edwina realized, but she also knew that the Moody women would survive, even if they lost their home. They could take an apartment. They wouldn’t be out on the street, for heaven’s sake.

Staring out the window as the plane descended, she reflected on her imminent homecoming. She touched her shoulder where the tattoo still lurked beneath her blouse, and a bemused smile surfaced as she remembered her other physical changes—freshly tanned skin and tousled, sun-bleached hair.
Edwina Jean, what’s happened to you?
she thought, imagining her mother’s reaction.

A lot had happened to Edwina Jean. A sweet terrible lot. She wasn’t entirely sure herself who this woman was that she was bringing home to Connecticut. Yes, there were going to be several shocks in store, she realized. For all the Moody women.

“Y
OU’VE KILLED MOM
, you know.” Beth Moody stood flat-footed and slitty-eyed in Edwina’s bedroom doorway, her arms crossed like a hanging judge about to hand down a sentence. “You’ve absolutely killed her.”

Ignoring her sister’s theatrics, Edwina continued unpacking her suitcase. She pulled out the white top she’d worn in California and without thinking brought it to her cheek, closing her eyes for a moment against its softness. It still felt warm with life. It smelled of campfire smoke and larkspur petals and passion. It smelled of him.

“Ed
weeena
!” Beth plunked herself on Edwina’s bed and resumed her glowering. “Are you listening?”

Of course I’m listening, Edwina thought. But her throat tightened with sadness as she clutched the shirt in her hands. Memories tugged at her poignantly, and the scent of him pulled at her senses, softening her breathing, weakening her heartbeat. Her body seemed to be responding as though from memory. And even though she knew it was only a trick of her mind, she could feel herself being drawn in, irresistibly snared by a lingering narcotic passion.
His
passion. He was in her blood. He was still there, like a drug.

“Ed? ...” Beth sounded worried.

Edwina shuddered reflexively. She was regressing again, and she couldn’t let that happen. She was in Connecticut now. It was over with him. It
was.
With an angry, shaking sigh, she walked to the clothes hamper and stuffed the top inside. One good wash cycle, some biodegradable detergent, a shot of Clorox, and that lost week in southern California would be gone forever, she told herself. Smells, men, motorcycles—all of it.

“Life goes on,” she said with conviction, turning to her sister. “Yes, I am listening, Beth. In fact I can hear Mom walking around her room right now. If I killed her, Beth, why is she walking around her room?”

“Oh, you know what I mean—emotionally. She thought you were dead or raped or something.” Beth rolled to her side, propped her chin on her fist and gazed at Edwina, wide-eyed. “And then she saw you kissing that biker on TV. Who was he, Ed? A Hell’s Angel? He looked like a Hell’s Angel.”

“He was a Warlord, Beth.”

Beth squealed. “A
Warlord?
Yikes! How did he kiss, Ed? Did he bite or anything?
Eeeeyuuuuu!
Did you like faint?”

Edwina scooped the rest of the clothes from her bag, walked to the hamper, and shoved them all inside. This really was too much. The possibility that her mother had seen the biker rodeo had never occurred to Edwina, although it should have. Katherine spent the majority of her days in bed, watching TV. In this case her mother had been a horrified witness to her elder daughter roping pigs and kissing an outlaw biker as if there were no tomorrow. She’d taken it badly, very badly.

Edwina let the suitcase lid drop with a sharp satisfying bang. It wasn’t nearly as jarring as the emotions churning inside her, but it would have to do. She was about to haul the case to the closet when she heard her mother’s soft voice behind her.

“Edwina, perhaps we should talk?”

Edwina’s throat tightened as she turned to see her pale, delicately built mother standing in her doorway. Somehow it always brought her sadness when she was confronted with her mother’s frailty. With her huge brown eyes and hesitant smile, Katherine Moody had the look of a gentle soul who needed protection from the world. And Edwina was her champion, it seemed.

“Yes, let’s talk,” Edwina said, signaling Beth to leave the room.

Beth made her exit, and Katherine walked to the stool that fronted Edwina’s vanity and seated herself carefully. Edwina watched her in silent reflection, wondering exactly when it was that everything had gone wrong in their lives.

Since her father had gone, she’d come to think of her mother as more child than parent in many ways. Katherine had been ill with one thing or another as long as Edwina could remember. Occasionally, Edwina had allowed herself to wonder if Katherine’s illnesses had driven off Donald Moody. She felt guilty even for the thought, but at the same time she couldn’t help but notice that her mother’s “spells” came and went with a certain regularity. Edwina could almost predict them now. Such as this very moment, she thought. Katherine was definitely on the brink of a crisis.

“I don’t mind so much that you didn’t call,” Katherine said gently. “But I was hurt that you didn’t tell me about the man. Who is he, Eddie?”

“It doesn’t matter, Mom,” Edwina said, trying to forestall any more discussion on the painful subject. “I won’t be seeing him again.”

“But Eddie, all that long hair. He looked like a hoodlum—”

Edwina shook her head. “That was his cover.”

“He’s a policeman?”

“No, a reporter—an investigative reporter.”

“It’s just not like you, dear.”

Truer words were never spoken, Edwina thought. It hadn’t been like her at all. Perhaps that’s why it had been so heartbreakingly wonderful. “Mom, we have some things to talk about ... the bills, the house.”

“No—not now, dear.” Katherine’s face went ashen, and she stopped the conversation with a raised hand. “I’m not up to that sort of thing at the moment.”

Edwina could have predicted that response too. Her mother was forever finding ways to avoid discussing their financial problems, as though denying them meant they didn’t exist.